Embedded Realities

Thursday 1 Sept – Worlds, worlds, and more worlds! SFs of all kinds!
• SF inventories: bring in yours from email to share results (KK’s FB list & NPR’s)
• Le Guin (1988), “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (on website & handed out)
• Elgin (1988), “Láadan Update” from Hot Wire & other Láadan materials to inspect

Layers of Worlds, layers of writings, layers of companionships: entering sf as speculative fiction, speculative feminisms, feminist fabulations, as well as science fictions or knowledge fictions offers many openings to worlding! We begin our class with folk taxonomies, fen and filk creativities, transmedia storytellings, and transdisciplinary feminisms! Jump on! We are off! Today and next week we will comb through sfs, boxes of books and stuff, friends of the class, con creativities, and share experiences, hopes, assumptions, and passions! Bundles....

Tuesday 6 Sept – Sharing as constitutive of SF worldings
• Merrick, Chap 1: The Genre Feminism Doesn’t See
• find/read something “sf” connected to arguments of this chapter, bring in, be ready to discuss connections
How many forms of “sharing” are possible, necessary, created in sf feminisms? Has anything you have read so far surprised you? If so, what and why? We will continue to go through boxes of books and stuff, trading stories and more. Making bundles....

Thursday 8 Sept – Ecologies, systems, infrastructures, webs
• the Web? “I broke it!” – jokes and realities about research on the web, and web sfs – bring us something to share that demonstrates uses of the web for sf feminisms
• transmedia platforms – bring in examples of storytelling across platforms
• find/read something “sf” connected here, be ready to discuss
How do sf feminisms live on the web today? what is the history of this? what happens when fictions are real? whose real are we talking about? inventory fandoms in terms of our bundles.... 

Tuesday 13 Sept – Everything Bad is Good for You: double consciousness & play
• Johnson, Part One: Games, Television, Internet, Film
• (optional): Davidson, Now You See It
• Johnson vocabulary & tools for cognition (handed out)
• find/read something “sf” connected here, be ready to discuss
Come prepared to give examples from one’s own experiences and fandoms. What assumptions is Johnson deliberately violating and why? why might this matter to feminists and how? Games and theories of play and learning…. 

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Double takes and double consciousness are at the heart of the theories of play and fantasy that Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman find useful for game design, and for new education projects.

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They challenge what they call “the immersive fallacy” – the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson is their touchstone for “metacommunicative media”: “play is a process of metacommunication, a double-consciousness in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation.” (Salen & Zimmerman 2004: 451)

As animals and children learn to play they come to know that there are some ways a play self can and must be separated from an everyday self, and they learn to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication forms of “not”: they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it.” The puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure. (Violence? Not.) The teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not necessarily the person they like the most. (Sex? Not.) Yet at the same time there are also other ways in which these selves simply are not separated, in certain physiological processes and psychological equivalences. The nip actually hurts a bit, the kissing blush and stammer. A double consciousness of being in both these states at the same time is possible, as Bateson puts it in formal terms, because play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism — communicatively social, as well as neurological and hormonal. Such metacommunications — or communications about communication — are performed by embodied selves at multiple “levels” of organic and social system, some sequentially, some simultaneously. (Bateson 1972, 1980)

Notice that metacommunication and metacommunicative media are at stake in double binds: good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double binds possible: “My body is reacting as if I am in danger, but really I’m in front of a computer screen.” (Reality? Not.) But Bateson was well aware that not every edge of play is so easily resolved: that transcontextual confusions and gifts arise from situations in which “tangles” remain – in which finding out which bits are active, which bits are context, which bits can be made explicit, which rules are perceptible, which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play, matters. And the skills for all this, transcontextual movement without falling apart – what restructuring academies, nations, and industries call “innovation” – are at the very heart of all those things that the word “gaming” now covers – from gambling to economic game theory, from game art and design to games as learning, from role-playing to systems theory – many of these playing with our distributed being, individual and collective, neurological and hormonal, industrial and creative. This is one context for considering sf feminisms today.

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Tiltfactor game lab: http://www.tiltfactor.org/

Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal: http://janemcgonigal.com/

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Thursday 15 Sept – SF feminisms, theories, fictions, sciences, fans, cyborgs
• Merrick, Chapters 4, 5, and 6
• find/read something “sf” connected here, be ready to discuss
What surprised you in these chapters of Merrick’s book? What felt especially confirming, of what, and why? Were any assumptions you held changed, or challenged? Did you discover assumptions you did not know you held? What changes about feminism when you read this? What changes about sf when you read this? 

Philip Pullman's Golden Compass is indebted to Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World. See the movie too....

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SO YOU SEE WHAT I MEANT BY “HARD CORE”? what might that mean here?
What did you like the most in what you read?
What was the hardest thing about reading these three chapters?
What surprised you?
What was something that made you feel good?
Did anything challenge you? Did you discover any assumptions you had?
Did you learn anything about feminism you didn’t know?
Did you learn anything about sf you didn’t know?

What did you find/read sf that you connected to all this?

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